Cognitive Science An Introduction to the Science of the Mind

This chapter looks back to the pioneering studies that prefigured the emergence of cognitive science, subsequently converging into this new interdisciplinary field in the late 1970s. The first section addresses a key turning point in psychology. Whereas behaviorism holds that all explicit behaviors are the product of conditioning, it became clear that animals can manipulate representations of the environment to solve complex problems without reinforcement. The second section introduces the Turing machine developed by Turing in the 1930s, illustrating that purely mechanical procedures can process information algorithmically. The idea of a computable machine contributed to the birth of computer science and provided a model for thinking about how the mind processes information. Chomsky's transformational grammar offers a classic example of a computable model of how complex sentences convey information as a function of basic syntax rules. Finally, Miller and Broadbent's findings on attention support applying the information-processing model in psychology. These pioneering researchers were the first to lay out some of what were to be the basic concepts of cognitive science.